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Don’t Wait for 10 to 15 Years in Your Job to Question Things

Why won't you play with me? Huh? Huh? Huh? “I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.” --Alexis de Tocqueville “When all think alike, then no one is thinking.” --Walter Lippman Recently, on a random Friday afternoon, I had the pleasure of receiving an irate phone call from a financial planner who took umbrage to the fact that I am strongly opposed to the assets under management fee model of financial planning. Granted, I’d only heard of this person that day when he responded to a comment of mine on another website, so he wasn’t completely unknown to me, but had you asked me who he was the day before, I’d have given you a completely blank stare. Despite his anger and clearly emotional tone, since he was a fellow West Point graduate, I listened. He proceeded to tell me, among other things, that I didn’t know what it was “really like” since I was relatively new to financial planning. “Wait until you’ve been in the industry for 10 to 15 years before you make any opinions” was the wisdom that he imparted upon me. Steve Jobs didn’t wait that long. Bill Gates didn’t wait that long. Thomas Edison didn’t wait that long. Elon Musk didn’t wait that long. Richard Branson didn’t wait that long. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t wait that long. I could write a list that would scroll for pages; you get the point, I trust. I personally don’t have 10 to 15 years to wait until I start making opinions about anything in my life, whether it’s personal or professional. Had I taken that opinion, I’d have not co-founded, run, and later sold a software development company that was based on doing things differently than the bureaucratic waterfall method of computer programming which I’d seen in my two years at Capital One. When I had my software development company, we intentionally brought in developers who were young, had non-traditional backgrounds, and took part in open source projects – meaning that, regardless of who they were, their merit was based on the quality of their code, not their ability to be political in an organization. We wanted fresh eyes to come in and question our ways of thinking. We didn’t always change, because, after all, sometimes we were right, but a lot of times we did because our previous way of developing software didn’t stand up to questioning and scrutiny when we were forced to truly dig in and answer for our decisions. The discussions almost always started either with “why do we...” or “why don’t we try...” and went from there. How does this apply to you? In almost any job that’s out there, you’re going to be asked to bring value to the table. You’re not just inserting Tab A into Slot B eight hours a day, five days a week, and going home. You’re not Fred Flintstone, working at the rock quarry, breaking larger rocks into smaller rocks until the work whistle blows. You’re there to improve the value of your employer, and part of how you do that is by bringing ideas to the table. I love James Altucher’s advice to come up with 10 new ideas every single day.

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